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March 19, 2006
They Shoot Movies, Don't They
They Shoot Movies, Don't They (IMDB) relates the story of Tom Paulson, a former hotshot baseball player who decided to make movies when his baseball career was derailed by a knee injury. Paulson scrapes together his savings for a relatively low budget feature (around $200,000), Mirage, but finds himself just a few thousand dollars short of completing the film and getting it distributed. Because we've never heard of Mirage or Tom Paulson, it's clear from the beginning of the film that Paulson's, we know that Paulson's film never succeeded, making They Shoot Movies a kind of cautionary VH1 "Behind the Music" episode ("Behind the Movies" maybe?) about the wanna-be star director who never managed to overcome the "second-act" complications thrown at him over the course of his brief career in entertainment. But like a "Behind the Music" episode, I felt They Shoot Movies never went deep enough in its exploration of the star system, choosing instead to stay on the unreflective surface without unpacking how stardom or indie, to name two examples, get constructed in our media-saturated society.
Like a "Behind the Music" episode, we see interviews with Tom, along with his friends and colleagues that describe his ongoing struggles to finance and finish Mirage, and a documentary crew follows Tom as he seeks to finance his film, including a scene in which Tom screens a rough cut in the hopes of building interest in the film. While Tom is hardly the most adept negotiator of the Hollywood scene, his attempts to seek financing for his film, whcih is clearly a labor of love for him, may be familiar to other indie filmmakers. The style of the film, with its heavy emphasis on talking-heads interviews and scenes in which the crew follows Tom to various meetings, allows us a glimpse of Tom's struggles to jumpstart his career. The film is an interesting, if somewhat cynical, glimpse inside a low-budget film production, and in that regard it fits in with other "inside Hollywood" films such as The Player, Sweet Liberty, and State and Main.
Mild spoliers follow: If you've seen They Shoot Movies, you will likely know that the film is, in fact, a mockumentary, with Tom Paul Wilson playing the role of "Tom Paulson," and other actors playing the role of Tom's friends and colleagues. In a sense, I felt that They Shoot Movies tries too hard to play with this boundary between reality and fiction without really capturing a full understanding of independent film production. This may be due to some weaker performances or the limited focus of the film on the several weeks in which Tom seeks the money to finish his film (we never actually see a single frame of Mirage, which is ostensibly nearly complete). I think They Shot Movies is of some interest for fans of mockumentaries, but the film itself seemed too cautious to achive a full critique of the studio mode of production, and the parody of the incompetent filmmaker also fell a little flat.
Posted by chuck at March 19, 2006 2:44 PM
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Comments
Nothing terribly enlightening to add .. just wanted to say great review of what sounds like an awful movie!
Posted by: Keith Demko at March 20, 2006 6:48 PM
I don't think it's an "awful" film. It just didn't execute a potentially interesting premise very well.
Posted by: Chuck at March 21, 2006 10:27 AM
I liked it. I thought it really did the trick. It sure fooled a lot of folks apparently.
I found this on the net. Anywho... nicely written review.
This is an interesting cross section of what looks to be viewers of IFC...
http://www.theyshootmovies.com/critic.htm
Posted by: Gracie Harland at March 22, 2006 10:40 PM
It looks like it did fool a number of people. I think I knew going in that it was a mockumentary, so that was never really a question for me, but for whatever reason, I was a little disappointed.
Posted by: Chuck at March 23, 2006 9:49 AM